Page 31 of If Looks Could Kill
Then why is he afraid?
He flexes and tenses like a Thoroughbred champing at the starting gate.
He springs.
Just, just as the blade breaks through, the eyes fly open. “Oh! Murder!” she cries with her last gasp of breath, but her eyes are laughing, laughing, her face smiling tauntingly at him, even as he hacks away at his gruesome task, it smiles, it laughs, itlives. The head lives. All but severed, the heart’s blood pouring, yet still it lives, and still those eyes burn, the tongue flickers, all the tongues flicker and hiss with hatred and cruel, cruel laughter, and he is frozen and stunned once again, passing into the void as vision closes around him with its tunnel of sight narrowing around her laughing, laughing face.
He will destroy that face.
When he returns once again from her final spell and she is cold and dead, he will take his time dismantling that face and all that belongs to it, so that no one can ever fall prey to the evil inside this demon girl. No murder, this; this killing is hero’s work. For the good of the tribe. For the peace of Christendom. A labor to be sung in ages to come. Monster-slaying.
But then again, they all were.
The Bowery, Lower East Side, ManhattanTabitha—Newspapers(Saturday, November 10, 1888)
“Fire in the Five Points!” the little newsboy on the street corner bellowed. “Republicans triumph with Harrison over Cleveland in a landslide! Mrs. Gould at death’s door! Another murder in East London! Kansas miners buried in an explosion! More detective work by Nellie Bly and a new story by Bret Harte! Get yourEvening Editionfor just one copper penny!”
“Evening, Oscar,” I told him.
The boy plied his trade as usual, still clad in the knickers he always wore, revealing bare legs despite a biting November chill bringing tidings of winter in its wake.
He barely spared me a glance. “Evening, Sally.”
“That’s not my name.”
He pulled a face. “You think I’ve got time to remember you?”
“Yes, I do,” I said, “since I buy a paper off you weekly and tell you my name each time.”
He rolled his eyes. “You wanna be remembered? That’s gonna cost you tips.”
“Tips?”
“Coin,” he said, as if I were a dunce. “A gra-too-ity. What the French call a ‘poor boy.’?”
Pearl looked at him, puzzled.
I laughed. “?‘Poor boy’! You mean, a pourboire?”
He stuck his pinkie finger up in the air. “If you’re snooty, then, yeah.”
“?‘Pourboire’ means ‘for a drink,’?” I told him. “I’m not buying you a beer.”
“S’all right.” He shrugged. “I’m more partial to whiskey.”
Pearl looked as scandalized as I felt.
“I’ll pay for my paper,” I said. “But no whiskey for you, my lad, not one drop.”
“Young man,” cried Pearl, “promise me you won’t drink that poison again. At your age!”
“That’s nothing, girlie,” he said. “I was raised on rum. Since I was a babe in arms.”
Lower East Side families who couldn’t afford milk raised their children on small beer. But whiskey! Rum! And the little fiend’s impertinence. Girlie, indeed!
“No tips, Oscar, but I’ll buy you something wholesome to eat,” I told him.
“Then you’ll have to sell my papers for me,” he said, “cuz if I don’t hit my quota, I don’t get paid. I got no time for a dinner break, and you yammering is costing me customers.”
